Monday, July 8, 2013

Incremental Transformation is Here Today

Transformation is generally something that is avoided at all
costs because it is viewed as big, difficult and costly, if
not desperate and extreme. World economic conditions, extreme competition
and the need for customized customer management are driving organizations
into situations that cause them to consider real transformations. We have seen
it in manufacturing, finance, healthcare and now retail. It seems that
organizations had better be ready to move in a rapid fashion to grab the bone.
That's the bad news, but the good news is that incremental transformation is
easily
ascertainable today with modern intelligent business process management (iBPM) technologies, methods and fleet
change management. I hope to document some compelling case studies around
the contributing factors to transformation in the coming months, but until
then, I have documented seven areas for organizations to focus on while on this journey (below).

Surround Your Legacy to Differentiate:

Your existing technology assets can either be
an anchor dragging you back or they can be leveraged going forward. Since business process management (BPM) is
good at orchestrating resources in a new and better context, leading companies
are adding BPM as a differentiating layer on top of existing processes, systems
and applications.

Make Your Policies and Rules Explicit
for Ease of Change:

Many organizations have their core policies
and rule embedded in peoples’ heads and systems. This is fine, if your world is
stable, but that is a luxury today that
many global organizations cannot validate. There are specific BPM vendors that
practice this approach throughout their platform, processes and solutions. This
allows for change within the same structure and in some cases affects the
actual structure of the solution.

Make Your Processes Agile by
Minimizing Structure:

With newer process technologies, flexible
process flows and cases are allowing for quick adaptation. Case management,
with the ability to shift milestones and activities on the fly, is one visible way
to enable unstructured and adaptable processes.

Make Your Desired Outcomes &
Progress Visible:

By making goals and desired business outcomes
visible, all those who are watching the score can affect the result. Visibility
also helps point out the need for adjustment, tuning and potential change
efforts. This is called the “Hawthorne Effect” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

Apply Intelligence Constantly and
Proactively:

It is important to run active and on-demand
analytics to see if changes might be necessary to intercept expected conditions.
Even if your organization is not trying to be predictive in its analytic
efforts, knowing when to react to changing conditions is the minimum price of
admission today. I expect that organizations will not be able to capitalize on
conditions without some predictive capability in the near future.

Design
for Global Impact, but Customize Locally:

In todays’ world, you do not have to do
business on a multi-national basis to want global process behavior with local
variation. While you certainly need global process and rules in a
multi-national situation, you may have needs for variation by product, service,
vendor, customer and business context. Smarter processes take this into effect
and allow for optimization on multiple goals simultaneously and shift goal
weightings when necessary.

Design a People Centric Approach to
Products, Services and Change:

Business change needs to be approached in a
new way now. Until recently,
process/application change was in the critical path to complete the change.
With modern BPM, the technology change is not the problem. Change paths need to
be designed to be faster and people change now becomes the issue to deal with
going forward. New communication methods and training techniques have to be
re-evaluated.

Net; Net:

Leveraging the proper built-in levers in BPM
and great change management practices, will give the executive suite and
process owners unprecedented power to transform incrementally. This is a
powerful ability that we have not had in the past.